Ethics is that branch of philosophy dealing with values
related to human conduct. It assesses the rightness and wrongness of actions and motives, and the moral justification of the
consequences of actions.

For our purposes, ethics is the study of observed and
perceived boundaries that are generally honored among all peoples. Actions are thus judged against the backdrop of boundaries defined by binary sets: life-death; male-female. It is not morally
right to murder because murder is unjustified violation of the boundary of
individual life. It is not morally right to steal because stealing violates the boundary of individual or communal property.

Ancient Moral Codes

The most ancient moral codes have many features in common. They appeal to the authority of the deity who was recognized by the ruler and they view the ruler as the deity's earthly representative. Another common feature is a concern for purity among the priestly caste as they were regarded as the mediators between the deity and the ruler and his people. Often the rulers themselves were priests, as in the case of Horite ruler-priests. When it came to ritual purity, especially to cleanse from blood guilt, ruler-priests turned to other priests for rituals of absolution. An example of this is found in the account of Abraham returning from battle and receiving the priestly ministrations of Melchizedek.

Most of what we know about ancient moral codes comes from archaeological and anthropological research. These fields, along with linguistics and biblical studies, have contributed enormously to our understanding of ethics among ancient peoples.

Babylonian
clay tablets dating to the 3rd century BC reveal business laws and
moral codes of considerable sophistication. Moral codes such as the Code of
Hammurabi did not spring suddenly into existence. They represent centuries of
social development and social control.

The Code of Hammurabi was engraved on a stele more than 7 feet
high. At the top of this stele of dark
stone appears an image of King Hammurabi standing reverently before the seated
Shamash, the god of justice. Shamash is dictating the law to his earthly representative.
The Code of Hammurabi closes with this statement: “The righteous laws which Hammurabi,
the wise king, has established . . .” Similarly, Leviticus closes with this: “These
are the commandments which YHWH commanded Moses for the children of Israel.”

When reading ancient moral codes, one is struck by their
religious quality. That is because religion and government were never perceived
as separate in the ancient world. The
moral codes of ancient societies were not produced by a chamber of legislators,
as in modern America.
They were laws drawn from both kings and priests. Many of the kings’ advisors were high ranking
religious leaders. This is evident today
in primitive societies governed by tribal councils. The chief’s advisors include married,
property-owning men, and the principle holy man, either a priest, a prophet or a shaman, depending on the cultural context.

The oldest know moral code is the Law of Tehut. Thiscode is associated with King Menes of Egypt and dates to about 5200 years ago. Menes made Memphis the capital of a united Egypt and administered justice and issued edicts which were designed to improve food production and distribution, guard the rights of ruling families, improve education and enhance knowledge of the natural world through geometry and astronomy.

Priests and Shamans

The offices of priest and shaman are some of the oldest
institutions known to humanity. The priest pertains to the Afro-Asiatic peoples
of the global south and the shaman to the Altaic and Uralic peoples of the
global north. While priests and shamans serve similar functions in their societies,
their worldviews are very different.

Underlying shamanism is the belief that there are powerful
spirits who cause imbalance and disharmony in the world (animism). The shaman’s role is to determine which
spirits are at work in a given situation and to find ways to appease the
spirits. This may or may not involve animal sacrifice. Underlying the
priesthood is belief in a single supreme Spirit to whom humans must give an
accounting, especially for the shedding of blood. In this view, one Great
Spirit holds the world in balance and it is human actions that cause
disharmony. The vast assortment of
ancient laws governing priestly ceremonies, sacrifices, and cleansing rituals
clarifies the role of the priest as one who offers animal sacrifice according
to sacred law.

The priests were a caste within which the younger men were apprenticed to the older priests, just as Samuel was apprenticed to Eli. Priests married the daughters of priests. Endogamy is a trait of castes. Similarly, the office of shaman runs in families and the shaman-in-training assists the shaman as part of his on-the-job training.

Bloodshed: The First
Moral Law

Both worldviews share anxiety about the shedding of blood,
revealing that archaic societies regarded the shedding of blood to be a moral
issue of the first magnitude. They
believed blood to be the source of life, and believed that blood had the power
to bring blessings or curses. Therefore,
before the hunting party departed, the priest or shaman offered sacrifice to
the spirits of the hunted animals. When someone killed another human by
accident, the killer was to provide an animal to be sacrificed in his place and
was to pay satisfaction to the victim’s family. If he killed on purpose, he would forfeit his life. All of these
decisions were governed by laws that were passed from generation to generation and
upheld by the rulers and their advisors.

There was even anxiety about the blood shed by women in
their monthly cycle and in childbirth.
For this reason it was common for women to remain in structures outside
the village during menstruation and childbirth. Female family members brought
them food and other necessary provisions. After ritual purification, the women
returned to their regular routines in the village. Women of the noble classes
remained in their chambers where female servants provided all their needs.

Among ancient peoples religious laws governed every aspect
of the community’s life. The laws found
in Leviticus and in the ancient Vedic Brahmanas are examples. Here we read
instructions for how lepers are to be put outside the community and restored to
the community after they are healed.
Many of the laws govern family relations, forbidding incest and
adultery. Others establish rules for the
proper treatment of slaves, foreigners, widows and orphans.

The clay tablet of the code of Ur-Nammu from the reign of
King Shulgi is dated to 2095-2047 BC It originally held 57 laws which covered
family and inheritance law, rights of slaves and laborers, and agricultural and
commercial tariffs. This code prescribes compensation for wrongs, as in this
example: "If a man knocks out the eye of another man, he shall weigh out
one-half a mina of silver." (Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 28, Sep/Oct
2002, p. 30.)

Ethics in the
Afro-Asiatic Dominion

The Code of Hammurabi dates to about 1750 B.C. Hammurabi was
an Amorite (Semite) who became King of Babylon about the time that Abraham left
his father’s house in Harran and settled in the land of Canaan.
The ancient capital of Babylon was about 55 miles
south of modern Baghdad and it was large city of
the Fertile Crescent. Although the city states of the Fertile Crescent shared common ideas and practices, these
cities were not unified under a single ruler.
Instead they were governed by independent rulers who were often related
by marriage. Marriage was a way to form political alliances, and contribute to
the preservation of the people’s cultural heritage.

Rulers of the Afro-Asiatic Dominion governed territories
extending from the Atlantic coast of modern Nigeria
to the IndusRivervalley of India.
They spoke languages in the Afro-Asiatic language family and controlled
commerce on the waterways. The Afro-Asiatic world was a river civilization that
disappeared when earth’s climate changed. Today central Africa, Palestine, Mesopotamia and India are dry, but 10,000 to 12,000 years ago these areas were wet and fed by rivers many miles wide. The basins of these now extinct or much
diminished rivers have been identified by satellite photos. Many of the laws of
the Afro-Asiatic Dominion pertain to commerce and water rights. (For more, read Alice C. Linsley, “The Afro-Asiatic Dominion.”)

Rulers controlled the major water systems of the ancient
world at a time when Africa and Asia were much wetter. These rulers were owed tribute for maintaining
order on the rivers. Royal priests
maintained shrines on the rivers where the tribute was collected, a portion
being offered to the shrine deity. As the climate changed the landscape of the
ancient world, some of the laws changed also.
For example, strangers who came to wells or watering holes in now arid
lands were no to be harmed or taxed. Wells and public watering holes became, by
law, places of immunity. This was all
the more necessary since they were frequented by women and children, whose job
it was to draw water.

Ethics of Family, Caste and
Territories

Before the emergence of nations, there were independent kingdoms. Adjacent kingdoms were often ruled by chiefs or kings who were brothers or close relatives. The kinsmen served as royal advisors. The earliest forms of government were kinship and caste based. The ethical standards of archaic communities
developed out of their kinship and concern for preserving family wealth and caste role. The Kushite rulers married close
female relatives, including half-sisters. Abraham married his
half-sister Sarah by whom he hoped to have a rightful heir. Their father was Terah, but they had different mothers.
Abraham also married Keturah (Gen. 25) who was his patrilineal parallel cousin.
That means that Keturah’s father and Abraham’s father had a common male
ancestor. It was easier to govern when
everyone shared a common ancestor from whom they received a common ethical and
moral outlook.

Later forms of government involved control of larger
territories as families became more militaristic. Rulers formed alliances with potential aggressors, often by
contracting a marriage between their sons and daughters. Treaties to support one another in the event of attack from a third power were formalized by marriage, or by the exchange of
gifts, and by solemn ceremonies that included animal sacrifices followed by a
night of feasting. While there was no
reason to align the moral codes of the allied territories, the cultural
exchange that took place because of the peace between them, led to sharing common
ethical views.

Councils and Oracles

Anthropological evidence indicates that the earliest laws
were established by tribal councils that consisted of a chief, his advisors or elders,
and the holy man. The holy man might be a shaman or a priest, and women were known to serve as advisors (though never as priests). Women were usually consulted
outside the all-male council meetings and were not members of the council.

The council set laws, interpreted laws, rendered decisions
in cases of conflict, and decided punishments when laws or boundaries were
violated. The council also deliberated about war strategy and how to avoid war. One of the oldest examples of ethical
practices involved the treatment of those sent to deliver messages to potential
enemies. This meant crossing a territorial boundary and could mean death for
the messenger. Messengers were to be granted safe travel in and out of enemy
territory to deliver their messages.

Another common practice among the ancients was consultation
of oracles or seers. When a tribal
council or an individual was uncertain as to what would be the best action, the
oracle was consulted. The oracle was
someone with the ability to discern the will of God or of the deities in
particular situations. The ancient Hebrews consulted “prophets” and the ancient
Babylonians relied on “astrologists.”
Often the prophet was consulted in hopes that he would provide an answer
different from what was already written in the peoples’ law codes. So the tradition developed in ancient Israel
that the test of the true prophet was that he upheld the written law even if it
meant defying the ruler, while the false prophet gave advice contrary to the
law in hopes of winning the ruler’s favor.

As in the Heavens, so
on Earth

The ethical and moral codes of ancient peoples reflect a worldview
that is foreign to modern Americans. As the Romanian sociologist Mircea
Eliade has shown, people of antiquity believed that things on earth are
patterned after things in the heavens.
Therefore decisions were made according to astronomical observations.
Usually these observations were done by priests or shamans and there was always
a risk that their calculations might be wrong. If the priest didn’t perform
important celebrations on exactly the right days, he might be blamed for
everything that went wrong. If the ruler died, or the crops failed, or there was
a natural disaster such a flood, the priest was to blame. The priest may not be
executed by an unhappy emperor, as happened to Chinese astronomers who failed
to predict the solar eclipse in 2134 BC, but he was still highly motivated to
avoid mistakes. This led to the
development of sidereal astronomy.

Solar
time is the measurement of time according to the earth’s rotation around the
sun, but sidereal time is the measurement relative to a distant star. It is
used in astronomy to predict when a star will be overhead. In making ethical decisions, especially decisions that pertained to the
timing of important events, ancient peoples relied on observations of the
stars.

Today many people still place
faith in astrology, although the astrology popular today is quite different
from the sidereal astronomy practiced by ancient priests and seers. The sidereal
day is the time required for the earth’s rotation to be synchronized with fixed
stars. It is almost four minutes shorter than the solar day. Sidereal astronomy
is based on the actual location of stars and constellations, unlike popular
astrology which is based on culturally-relative symbolism associated with stars
and constellations. Sidereal astronomy began out of an ethical concern to not
violate boundaries that were believed to have been established by the Creator
in the beginning.

The Beginnings of
Science and Technology

Discoveries in archaeology and anthropology have pushed back
the beginnings of science and technology, requiring reconsideration of the
relationship between philosophy and science. It is evident from the study of
early human communities that their conceptions of non-material entities
(metaphysics) influenced their development of science (physics). It is true also that their discoveries in
science and technology influenced their views of reality and existence
(ontology).

As mentioned before, archaic humans were avid observers of
the heavens. They made the first astronomical charts based on the visible key
points in the night sky. They developed a coordinate system that astronomers
use even today. They tracked the Sun's position among the stars and observed are recorded solar eclipses. They observed the lunar phases and eclipses and used
their celestial observations to establish the times for festivals, hunting and planting.

Thousands of years ago rulers were building pyramids across the surface of the earth. Many of those pyramids have been identified. These pyramids reflect a fairly sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and architecture. Ancient sites such as pyramids, tombs and fortresses often align with the cardinal points and open to the east and/or west. The alignments of many ancient sites appears to reflect knowledge of sidereal astronomy.

Some sites align to the point of origin of the people who built them. Old Arabic is sometimes called "Dedanite" because that is where the largest concentration of old Arabic scripts has been found. The oldest mosques were aligned to a site in Dedan.

Kushite peoples aligned their temples to Heliopolis (Biblical Onn), the geodetic center of Egypt. The corners of most of the 4th - 6th dynasty pyramids are aligned to Heliopolis. The pyramid triads at Giza, Zaqqara and Abusir are examples. Baalbek in Lebanon, also called Heliopolis, aligns to the obelisk in Heliopolis, the City of the Sun. The earliest human settlement were located at elevated sites near water. The "high places" were also shrine cities.

About 70,000 years
ago tunnel mines were being worked in the Lebombo Mountains from which
they extracted red ocher for use in the burial of rulers. This is verified by the discovery of graves
of noble persons around the world which were lined with red ochre powder.

The 4000 year old archives of Ebla reveal a worldview based on binary
distinctions, systematically observed and listed. During the Neo-Sumerian
period, there was great interest in the stars accessible to observation; most
of these being the visible fixed stars. As far as we know, this is the
beginning of sidereal astronomy. Calendar-making began much earlier. The Lebombo Bone, the
oldest known calendar, reveals that humans were marking time 40,000 years ago.

The interest of archaic peoples to know their time and place
relative to the heavens suggests an ethical concern about not violating
perceived boundaries. In a real sense
this is exactly what Ethics considers. Where is the boundary between right and
wrong, or between good and evil? What is
the limit when asserting my rights over against your rights? Are all boundaries
relative to the individual’s context?
Are there fixed boundaries by which we are guided in moral decisions? Is
selfishness morally justifiable? These are some of the questions to be considered
in the lessons that follow.

Summary

The earliest law codes date to the 3rd century BC
and reveal a high level of sophistication. These codes do not represent the
beginning of the practice of codification, but reflect a period of history when
that practice was already fully developed.

These ancient law codes express belief that citizens are
morally obligated to obey the laws because these laws are divinely inspired and
given through the king who is the Deity’s earthly representative. This concept of moral obligation to obey the
law continued through the 17th century, finding its European
expression in the concept of “the divine right of kings”.

Bloodshed was one of the principal ethical concerns of
archaic man. Priests and shamans
addressed the guilt and anxiety felt by both individuals and communities when
human life was taken. Priests offered prayers and animal sacrifice to cover the
offense to the Creator of the one who killed.
Shamans offered prayers and sacrifices to appease the spirits, including the spirits of the dead ancestors, so that these spirits would not bring harm to the individual or the
community.

While priests and shamans served a similar societal function
to relieve the consequences of blood shed, it is evident that their worldviews
were different. The priest is concerned about offense to the Creator while the
shaman is concerned about offending the spirits.

Social and political organization among archaic peoples
reflected the hierarchy of kings, tribal rulers, priests, shamans, and prophets
or “oracles”. Rulers married royal
brides. Kinship and caste formed the basis of
alliances between rulers of adjoining territories. The moral obligation to obey the ruler was
based on the loyalty owed to family, clan and tribe as much as to the idea that
the ruler represented the Deity.

Oracles involved study of the constellations because it was
believed that “as in the heavens so on earth.” This was the origin of sidereal
astronomy. By studying the relationship
of stars and their heavenly movement, the oracle established the most favorable
date to hunt, to harvest, or to go to war.

Archaic peoples wanted to know their time and place relative
to the heavens because they were concerned about not violating perceived
boundaries. These boundaries are the
framework within which ancient Man deliberated ethical concerns.